You know that whole thing about how being superskinny is an ideal originated by the fashion industry and perpetuated by female competitiveness and like, totally NOT AT ALL what men are interested in etc. etc.? Well that's bullshit, says a story in the March Elle by Amanda Fortini, a 5'6 woman who dropped to 100 pounds a few years back. "Many men, I quickly learned, really do like frighteningly lean women, whatever they may claim to the controversy. As an average, medium-size young woman, I was unremarkable, innocuous. As a skinny slip of a thing, I was something of a sensation. In restaurants and at parties, men flirted at me extravagantly." Men in media and literary circles hit on her frequently and audaciously, (one of them with the awesome line, "You remind me of a heroine from a Joan Didion novel." (You know, "all bones and big eyes.") "As a male friend once put it to me, semifacetiously," she writes, 'A little anorexia is hot.'" But would they have thought it was hot if they knew what was swimming inside her guts??

That's right, it wasn't anorexia! Turns out she had a whole bunch of Entamoeba Histolytica , tropical parasitic protozoa she'd contracted in Belize, digesting her food for her! Ewwwww!

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Anyway on a side note, she describes herself as someone who worked in "fashion magazines," but when you Google her it seems like she was also once on staff at the New York Review Of Books — which is sort of the annoying part: literati dudes actually dig waify anorexic types, in my experience, more than bankers. Because they are little and not very manly and it's not as brazen as digging girls with weaves and implants and also it's cool to hate on fat people. God I hate New York!